When
I was only three or four years old I remember visiting my great
step-grandmother in a nursing home. I
remember her complaining that she had pain in her knee. Now I didn’t know what the word “pain” meant. I remember thinking, “I hope I never have
pain. It sounds like it hurts a lot!”
I’ve titled this sermon “The Problem
of Pain” because pain is indeed a problem.
C.S. Lewis wrote a book by the same title, and admits that no matter how
you study it pain is a problem. Most of
our faith questions topics this Lent have not had answers. Indeed that is the case again today, but as
in the case of the rest of the topics, engaging the problem is very
constructive.
Oftentimes pain makes sense to
us. A few weeks ago in a Sunday sermon I
mentioned the time I injured my finger with a sledge hammer. There was definitely pain with that, and
getting my finger sewn back together hurt more than the original injury! But it made sense. I did something stupid. Now I pay the price.
And sometimes pain makes no
sense. Again from the sermon a few weeks
ago I brought up the girl who was severely injured by a drunk driver on
Christmas Eve. That makes no sense at
all. And many an atheist will state that
if there is a God, and if God is as good and loving as we Christians insist God
is, then why does God allow so much suffering in the world? And that is a fair question.
Now some will say that pain teaches
us things. Indeed pain is a good
teacher. You can bet I will never ever
use a sledge hammer again the way I used it when I injured my finger! I learned a lesson that will endure forever.
And some will say that God can use
pain to toughen us up for difficult tasks.
The Bible verse from Romans 5 that we read earlier comes to mind,
“…suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character
produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” Indeed there are times when pain strengthens
us for what lies ahead. And indeed God
can do anything, so it is very much within the realm of possibilities that God
can use pain to strengthen us. You know
the saying, “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
Along these lines, pain can
certainly help us to be more empathetic.
After our worship tonight AA comes in to use the room. AA is a perfect example of pain being used to
create empathy. Who better than someone
dealing with an addiction to alcohol to connect with others with the same
struggle? Only an alcoholic knows the
real power of the addiction itself, and the family dynamics, and the
sneakiness, and the enabling, and the manipulation, and the lying that all goes
into it. Of what good is any therapist
who only knows the problem in theory.
And aren’t the best medical doctors
the ones who know what it’s like to receive medical care? The best bedside manner from surgeons comes
from surgeons who’ve had surgery.
This all hit me suddenly a couple
years ago when Scott Swigart was in the emergency room at Strong Hospital. Usually the doctors and nurses come in and
tell a patient what medicines her or she is being given. But when I visited Scott I noticed the staff
was asking him what medications he wanted to receive! I was astonished and when the staff left I
remarked on this. Scott smiled and said
he’d trained them all!
Indeed pain can have many
constructive purposes. But let’s not go
so far as to say that all pain has a reason.
And let’s not do as I hear far too often, “I’m sure God has a purpose
for this. I’m just not sure what yet.”
We are far better to take the
thoughts of 13th Century Thomas Aquinas who said that pain is not a
good thing in itself, but a thing which might
have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. But we have to leave it at that.
Ultimately if we reach the conclusion
that we humans are very good at – that the presence of pain is a sign of God’s
displeasure, and the absence of pain is a sign of God’s pleasure in us – then
we are wrong. It just doesn’t work out.
And thus the problem of pain. I’ll recommend reading C.S. Lewis’s book The Problem of Pain if you want to go
deeper into this. He admits his conclusions
are not new or unique. Ultimately he
concludes that pain is a consequence of God giving us free will. You may remember just two weeks ago the way
Lutheran theology struggles with the idea of free will and eventually rejects
it. Interestingly Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940. Then in 1961 he published A Grief Observed which is a series of
journal entries he wrote in his dealing with the pain of the death of his wife
Joy Davidman. They had been married only
four years when she died. A Grief Observed does not invalidate The Problem of Pain but it seriously
questions all logic in regards to pain.
Let me conclude with one of Lewis’s
last journal entries in A Grief Observed:
“Sometimes,
Lord, one is tempted to say that if you wanted us to behave like the lilies of
the field you might have given us an organization more like theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand
experiment. Or no; not an experiment,
for you have no need to find things out.
Rather your grand enterprise. To
make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a
“spiritual animal.” To take a poor
primate, a beast with nerve-endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that
wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, “Now get on
with it. Become a god.”
A Grief Observed, Bantam Edition
1976, pg. 84
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